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We’re here for a visit. Brought two cakes and what cheer we can. She’s been here three years, the same amount of time that she’s been blind,

the same amount of time that she’s lost her will to live. She’s tried three times, and three times she’s been stitched back up. Now she sits

in her room, floods of winter sun warming her back and yet she sits in the dark, in blackness without sight, not caring.

‘And I don’t even have the heating turned on,” she remarks. We chat, she chats – economics, banking, politics, but no

mention that we just buried her sister’s ashes today. The late afternoon sun dances on her face, shadows set

into deep wrinkles ploughed by age. She’s a sundial casting shadows. And we eat cake, cut into neat squares by the nurse.

No one is allowed to touch knives here. Nor scissors. No cords on drapes. And in between sips of tap water and bites of cake

she says, ‘It’s a struggle growing old,’ and I can’t but agree, although I’m twenty-years her junior, and then she says,

‘Living like this is pure hell.” Without emotion and matter of fact, stating facts as facts. And what do you say

to a statement like that. So we nod and clear our thoughts with more cake talking long into late afternoon. The sun casts

deepening colours that track the time, and we offer the nurse one more piece of cake but she declines, taps her watch, saying

that it’s time for goodbyes. The cake is packed up by the ward nurse, and taken away, where I don’t know, but suspect

that the nightshift will swarm on it and then lick the plate clean. I can but only agree; living like this is pure hell.

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Written in Denmark 28 April 2013. This is written based on real events and prompted to Joseph’s Recursions prompt #21. This piece does not follow a specific form, but I have restricted its rhythm and confined it ‘spread’ to an 8.8.12 count per stanza with 3 lines per stanza (reflecting the Taoist belief that the number 3 symbolises death, not specifically of a person, but perhaps a belief or way of being). Recursion Prompt #21